On Wednesday in the subway our Deputy German coordinator Bernhard made this nice picture in the subway.

Bernhard Reiter, CC-By.

This add was visible in the whole subway. The translation of the text on the left side:

Free Software – News at LinuxTag – Under the slogan "Linux is worth it", Linuxtag — the leading congress around the free operating system — started in Berlin. Until Saturday, they expect more than 10,000 visitors.

Do you like football? Well you do not have to, to participate at the EURO 2012. Guido Arnold announced a parallel tournament for the European football championship 2012. The criteria: Free Software usage in the public administration. The rules are relatively simple, you can read them in Guido’s blog. Tomorrow evening there will be 22 matches. Enough time for you to influence the them.

As it is common in football since some time to bribe the referee, this is also possible: Just transfer the money to FSFE’s bank account with the subject “donation for Free Software European championship [Country name]” and announce your bribery via microblog with the above mentioned hashtag ;)

Yesterday at the Fellowship meeting in Berlin Ali Gunduz gave a talk about the “Fully Free GNU/Linux Distribution Movement”. Here the abstract:

For the past few years, a growing number of GNU/Linux distributions have been started with the specific goal of ensuring users’ software freedoms before everything else. In this presentation, I will try to draw an overview of the fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement and provoke participants to think about software distributors’ ethical responsibilities. What aspects of mainstream GNU/Linux distributions does this movement not find sufficient? Which distributions align themselves with the movement? What is their rationale for limiting functionality of their software offerings in the name of upholding user freedoms? What does a binary blob mean and what does the Linux-libre Project claim to accomplish that the vanilla kernel Linux doesn’t? How does the fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement affect the rest of the free software ecosystem? I am planning to keep the overall tone of the discussion newcomer-friendly while also providing some food for thought for the technically inclined.

It was a very interesting discussion. After the talk, when I bought something to drink from Martin, who is working for the newthinking store, he showed me he already tested the Trisquel Live-CD on his notebook and everything including Wifi was working.

Also on the agenda was the preperation for the Document Freedom Day on March 31st. I am already looking forward to it.

Before we left the Newthinking Store, Martin took a picture of all people not afraid to see their picture on the internet showing Ali our love with a big group hug.

At the weekend I was in Vienna to participate in Vienna’s Fellowship meeting, and to meet with the Fellows there, especially Martin Gollowitzer, the new Deputy Fellowship coordinator.

So first on Friday evening I attended the Fellowship meeting at metalab (for those of you who know the c-base in Berlin, it is the Vienna equivalent). It was also the first time I meet Georg Kienesberger and Peter Bubestinger — our Austrian team coordinators — as well as a lot of very motivated Fellows. After participating in the Fellowship meeting, I know that we are on the right track with the Fellowship and that we will achieve a lot for Free Software in Europe.

On Saturday, Martin and myself discussed several aspects of the Fellowship and our future goals. You will definitely read more about that. But you should already block 13-15 November 2009 in your calenders, as we will have a Fellowship meeting in Göteborg at the FSCONS.

And now to something completely different. For lunch we did the bravest thing in my life, we went to the origin of the legend about the Schnitzelmonster — the Temple of Schnitzel also called Schnitzelwirt by the natives. For the background: Nobody is allowed to write about the details of this ancient legend. They are only given from brave Fellows to other brave Fellows in the right place and the right time. There only exists on old song about what happened at the Schnitzelwirt. Now on Saturday, together with with a small group of other brave Fellows we pilgered to the place where everything begun and honoured those who have been there before. And yes, we were able to finish the ceremony and earned the respect of of the Schnitzelwirt.

If you are living around Vienna or your travel brings you near by, you should definitely visit the Fellowship meetings there. They are announced on FSFE’s events site, or via FSFE’s RSS event feed.

Just read that Germany’s new IT-Council announced today that they will introduce ODF in the federal public administration. All federal public administrations should be able to receive, sent, read, and modify ODF documents until beginning of 2010. It is already published on heise and golem (both in German).

FWIW, I think the reason was not the German Bundestag decision from 5. Juli 2007 to support Open Standards — no — he has seen the pictures with the tart Vice-President Steinmeier got from us at DFD in Berlin ;-)